Breitbart is Adrift and Taking on Water

Breitbart is bleeding readers and capital. The embattled masthead is adrift and quickly sinking, now that Steve Bannon is no longer at the helm.

Part of this is due to Bannon’s exile from both Breitbart and the White House, leaving the news outlet without an insider in the Trump Administration. According to comScore, Breitbart has lost over 50% of its website traffic since November, down to just 7.8 million monthly visitors.

Meanwhile, Fox News is investing heavily in the digital arena, and has ramped up their advertising campaigns on Facebook. This approach appears to be working out quite well, as their traffic has climbed to 80 million monthly visitors. However, a relative newcomer is also responsible for the decline of Andrew Breitbart’s namesake.

True Pundit, the news aggregator that appeared seemingly out of nowhere in August 2016, has been steadily acquiring many of Breitbart’s readers. The site, run by an anonymous user under the enigmatic Thomas Paine pseudonym, has put quite a dent in its more established competitor’s readership.

The independent news outlet True Pundit has been nominated for the prestigious T.S. Eliot Award, for banality in journalism. The award is given to only the most hackneyed journalists, who best embody the spirit of imitation now held in such high regard.

–Danny Wolf

I’m sure the irony isn’t lost on Breitbart’s staff, as the king of copy & paste steals their traffic, while building an audience on content primarily scraped directly from Breitbart. True Pundit has focused entirely on dominating Twitter, while producing no original content whatsoever. It’s a sad realization that a news site with no writers is taking down an established conservative news outlet by stealing their content and mastering the annoying art of tweeting incessantly.

Between Facebook’s reactionary throttling of news publishers, and hackneyed “journalists” like Thomas Paine, the few bastions of truth in this industry may be living on borrowed time. I sincerely hope someone rises to the occasion, and returns the late Andrew Breitbart’s flagship to its former glory.